Kendria Dubois felt she had sacrificed health and family to keep her job as a resident care coordinator at a Mansfield nursing home.
One night in March 2025, Dubois, 46, says she began to vomit and pass blood during an overnight shift, prompting a call to her superiors and her staff. Nobody answered, she says, so she toughed it out until the end of her shift at 6 a.m. before rushing to the emergency room where she learned she had intestine inflammation.
Dubois — who also has multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune nervous system disease with no cure — was fired a little more than two months later. In a federal lawsuit filed last month, she claims the nursing home discriminated against her for her disabilities.
“I kept putting all these people first, and put myself at the bottom,” Dubois told KERA News. “But when it mattered, I was the first to go.”
The complaint is becoming increasingly common in Texas.
The state had the highest number and percentage of disability complaints in the country filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2025. And that year saw more disability complaints filed than any other year in decades, according to EEOC data that goes back to 1992.
Management for the nursing home, Cedar Bluff, did not respond to KERA’s request for an interview or comment. The company has also not filed a response to the lawsuit as of Monday.
Why are complaints on the rise?
Disability discrimination complaints with the EEOC have only increased as older generations experience natural health decline, said Michael Maslanka, an associate professor at the University of North Texas at Dallas who teaches employment law.
"Two words, one concept: baby boomers," Maslanka said. "You're going to have a spike, and it's going to continue for a while I think.”
Texas could also have more complaints because some large states like California have their own agencies to handle discrimination claims.
"There may be less action in the California EEOC, or even in California's federal court, because the state protection is better," said Brian East, an attorney at Disability Rights Texas.
Employees with disabilities are largely protected from discrimination by the American with Disabilities Act and the Texas labor code, which aims to mirror the ADA.
Congress passed a law in 2008 that strengthened the ADA and made it easier to win a disability complaint against an employer, East said.
"What I started to see was a big increase again after that in the percentage of cases that are about disability, because disability was reinterpreted to be a pretty broad concept," East said.
The law states that once an employee has notified their employer of a disability and its limitations, the employer must provide a "reasonable accommodation."
What's reasonable can depend on the size of the employer and the nature of the job, Maslanka said. Whatever the accommodation, it can't put an undue hardship on the employer.
That makes each disability complaint case unique.
"All these cases are extremely factually intensive," Maslanka said.
Only 20% of disability complaints nationally are resolved in favor of the worker.
Some workers, like Dubois, take their employer to court after filing a complaint with the EEOC.
'I was not respected'
Dubois, originally from Louisiana, started working in the health care industry when she was 17.
“It is one of my passions," she said. "It's my first choice to actually take care of others."
Dubois would come to learn she had health issues of her own. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2008. And in 2018, doctors found she had pseudotumor cerebri, which is when the pressure in the skull is too high. It can lead to vision changes and headaches.
Those conditions never meaningfully impacted her ability to work until she started working at Cedar Bluff Assisted Living in Mansfield around September 2023 as a resident care coordinator, she said.
“My blood pressure was high, I started having the numbness, the back issues,” Dubois said. “I still would go to work.”
Dubois was responsible for scheduling nurses for the week, interviews, drug destruction, medical audits and working on call if needed, she said. She eventually took time off intermittently under the Family and Medical Leave Act from November 2024 to January 2025. It came out to about three weeks in total, she said.
Workers are allowed up to 12 weeks of intermittent FMLA leave per year, according to federal law.
Once she returned to work her bosses “initiated a campaign of discrimination and retaliation against her, seeking to manufacture reasons for termination,” her lawsuit claims.
That was made clear to her, she said, after she got a call from the health services director in May 2025. The lawsuit alleges that during the phone call the director told Dubois people were out to get her for her attendance, and she needed to “watch” her intermittent time off.
Dubois said she reported the call to human resources the same day. Less than a month later, she was fired.
Dubois said she was told she had failed to perform tuberculosis screenings, gather information for state assessments and failed to put schedules out in a timely manner. The lawsuit calls those reasons “manufactured.”
“It would be one thing if I was terminated for the attendance. I could have took that,” Dubois said. “But to lie on me, and discredit me as if I wasn't nothing, that's the part that hurts the most.”
East said this type of complaint is a "pretext case."
"The employer is saying, 'it wasn't your disability or your need for accommodation, it was because you were crummy or you did some act of misconduct,'" East said. "And the plaintiff is saying, 'no, that's not why you fired me. You actually fired me because I needed this accommodation.'"
'You wouldn't treat a dog like this'
Over a year after being fired and filing a complaint with the EEOC, Dubois last month filed a federal lawsuit against the nursing facility.
“Right is right, wrong is wrong,” she said. “And I feel that there needs to be accountability, because you can’t just go around treating people like they’re nothing.”
Dubois became emotional, explaining that she felt used.
“You wouldn't treat a dog like this,” she said. “I was not respected. I mean, no matter what I did, how much I gave, at the end, it did not matter.”
Losing the job meant losing her insurance. Dubois said she’s had to pay over $1,000 out of pocket for an epidural injection to relieve her pain — a common symptom of multiple sclerosis. The pain has made it hard for her to spend time with her grandchildren, which is what she cares about the most, she said.
But Dubois said that’s not going to stop her from fighting.
“If nothing else, I truly want to be an example for my grandbabies,” she said. “Every day that I wake up above ground is another day to get it right. Another day to try a little bit harder.”
Dylan Duke is KERA's breaking news reporter. Got a tip? Email Dylan at dduke@kera.org.
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